I was watching a few episodes of a TV show, which I won't name because I can't remember the name, and I was struck more than usual by the thought that if it had been half as long it would have been twice as good. The plot and the actors were drowned in what someone considered the need to fill 10 hours of streaming television.
This observation is not unique to that series, whatever it is. Surely every TV critic writing today has had occasion to say that a series is too long, even in a mostly positive review. “Netflix bloat” was the term used for a time to describe a situation, specific to the streaming and series era, in which the number of episodes a show runs is determined not by the demands of the material but by some a priori executive calculation that ultimately translates into dollars, into the network’s or creators’ pockets, or to give subscribers the impression that they are getting value for their money. But a show that tells its story over eight or ten episodes, just to fill that space, can be derailed by unnecessary subplots or flashbacks or anticlimactic pacing. More can be less.
In related news, “Ted Lasso” is reportedly gearing up for a fourth season, though it neatly wrapped up business with the third.
All this got me thinking about the good and bad side of television and other things.
Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jason Sudeikis in Season 3 of “Ted Lasso,” which many thought ended after three seasons but could return for a fourth.
(Apple TV+)
Time, Einstein taught us, is relative. It either passes slowly or flies. All the performing arts exist in time. They stretch it or compress it. Chopin wrote a “Minute Waltz”; a current performance of John Cage’s “ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible),” which began in 2001 on a church organ in Halberstad, Germany, is expected to end in 2640. The organ’s pedals are held down with sandbags, but humans have played the piece in performances lasting 12 to 24 hours.
Things that last a long time (what many would call too long) can be worthwhile when the intention is clear. Whether one is dedicated to enjoying the entire tour or simply appreciating the concept, duration is part of art. Andy Warhol’s “Empire” is an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building whose purpose is to “watch time pass.” Christian Marclay’s “Clock,” a 24-hour montage of clocks cut from television shows and movies, which has been shown at LACMA, is synchronized to the actual time in which it is shown. In the theater, we find the Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-hour production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” (I saw it, it was great) and Peter Brook’s nine-hour production of Jean-Claude Carrière’s “The Mahabharata.” Thomas Jolly, artistic director of this year's Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, staged a 24-hour run of Shakespeare's “Henry VI” and “Richard III” (pillows were provided for those napping).
These works are designed to be inhabited as much as consumed. Robert Wilson, whose productions are unmatched in their time-stretching stillness, is a master of very long-form works. “Einstein on the Beach,” Wilson’s nonnarrative opera with Philip Glass, runs five hours. His 1972 play “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing” ran without interruption for seven days. “You could see the play at 8 a.m., 3 p.m., or midnight,” Wilson wrote, “and the play would always be there… It would be a bit like going to a park where you could daydream, watch the clouds change, watch people walk by, and even read a book, and suddenly a ready-made play would appear that combines the real with the surreal.”
Performance of Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” by the Los Angeles Opera in 2013. The opera lasts approximately five hours.
(Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Art is shaped by the technology that conveys it. The amount of time that could be comfortably recorded on one side of a 78- or 45-rpm record capped the length of a pop song, which became the radio standard; when Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” made its way onto AM radio, it was a revolutionary moment. LPs gave artists room to expand and explore: take the Grateful Dead’s 23-minute “Dark Star,” whose majesty was no stranger to its length. When Dylan released the 16-minute “Highlands” in 1997, it was hailed as the seal of his creative comeback.
When CDs arrived, they could hold 74 minutes of music — almost twice as long as a typical vinyl LP — and for a while, artists felt that not packing them with material was somehow cheating their fans: songs that would otherwise have been left off were put on, not necessarily for the worse. Sequencing went out the window; tracks at the end of a record were rarely heard. Most artists eventually moved away from this craze, even before CDs went out of style and LPs came back into fashion.
Historically, a movie typically ran between 90 and 120 minutes, because film is expensive and theater owners calculated their profits by how many times a movie could be shown in a day. There were exceptions: movies whose length already affirmed their importance, going back almost a century to D.W. Griffith’s three-and-a-half-hour “Intolerance.” “Gone With the Wind” ran nearly four hours, as did later temporary blockbusters like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” with an intermission. Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a movie under three hours since “Hugo,” apart from “The Silence,” which runs just two hours and 41 minutes. (“Taxi Driver,” by contrast, is 114 minutes.) Long can be good — “Seven Samurai,” “Children of Paradise” — or much less good — almost all modern superhero movies. But what moviegoer wouldn’t give a bag of gold to see the original, lost nine-hour version of Erich Von Stroheim’s “Greed”? (Whether it was too long or perfect, we’ll never know. Too short doesn’t seem like a possibility.)
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1. Omar Sharif, left, and Peter O'Toole in the nearly four-hour epic drama “Lawrence of Arabia.” (Photos from Columbia) 2. Clark Gable, left, and Vivien Leigh in “Gone with the Wind.” The film also runs nearly four hours. (MGM/MGM)
Back to my area of professional interest: Linear TV shows come in multiples of 30 minutes, organized like Tetris blocks on a prime-time schedule, and in seasons of up to 22 episodes. Streaming series’ episodes, typically running six, eight or 10 per season, can be as long (or short) as needed. In the U.K., imports like Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” taught American creators the beauty of the six-episode sitcom, now standard on cable and streaming platforms, though the home-broadcast version of “The Office,” following an older model, packed as many as 28 episodes into a year. Streaming dramas tend to tell serialized stories that run for a season, like a very long movie chopped into pieces. Episodic series, on the other hand, which make up the bulk of what airs on broadcast TV, may lack their grandeur, but they have the advantage of wrapping up a story at the end of an hour or half-hour. There is no room for deviation; your energy is concentrated.
How long should a series last? On ad-supported linear TV, the answer is as long as the ratings continue to make it attractive to advertisers, and on premium cable, the answer is as long as it remains attractive to subscribers. (Streaming platforms are tight-lipped about their calculations, but it’s a combination of the two.) Some shows last until a period of diminishing returns — that terrible term, “jumping the shark.” Some great shows have been canceled after just one season: “Freaks and Geeks,” “Wonderfalls,” “The Middleman” and “Frank’s Place” are on my personal list of untimely deaths. And yet what they created in their time was nearly perfect and, in its own way, complete.
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1. Donald Glover’s “Atlanta” has concluded after four seasons. (Rob Youngson/Special Effects) 2. Devery Jacobs and Lane Factor in “Reservation Dogs,” which ended after three seasons. (Shane Brown/Special Effects)
In the case of streaming series, I’ve come to think that three or four seasons are ideal — enough time to build a world, explore its nooks and crannies and move toward some kind of conclusion, but not so long that writers have to reanimate the narrative with new arcs and characters. “Reservation Dogs,” one of the best shows of the 21st century, intentionally closed after its third season, as “Atlanta” did after its equally good fourth. I would expect “The Bear,” after its plot-light third season, to do the same. These are creative decisions, not commercial ones. When “The Dick Van Dyke Show” decided to close after five years of high ratings, Van Dyke told Life magazine, “We wanted to leave it while we were still proud of it.” Jerry Seinfeld ended “Seinfeld” after nine seasons, even though the show was still a commercial powerhouse, and the star was offered $5 million an episode to return for a 10th.
But if time is relative, so is taste. Like Einstein’s man on the train versus the man on the platform, it depends on where you stand. What seems too long to you may seem too short to me; what seems exactly enough to me may leave you wanting more. A four-hour documentary by Frederick Wiseman (most recently, last year’s “Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros”) is heaven; the equally long “Zach Snyder’s Justice League” is hell. “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s six-hour docuseries about the Beatles, is packed with information, but Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute “Let It Be,” from whose outtakes and takes Jackson’s is made, seems to me the superior aesthetic experience.
Why might there be more “Ted Lasso” in our future? For money, sure. But people who work together can create familial bonds; actors can like each other and the characters they play. They might want to play that music one more time, and maybe another time, like Mick and Keith at 80, or Oasis at 50. Ultimately, there is no “should” in any of this. And who can say no when the answer could just as easily be yes?
